Student Design Challenge

To answer the emerging needs of Social Innovation, it becomes more important than ever to develop designers’ skills in the design of contemporary artefacts, products and services that engage with interactive, user-focused technologies and processes.

OzCHI Student Design Challenge aims to enhance your understanding of the unique relationship that exists between interactive activities, products and human behaviour. You’ll be challenged with a diverse range of interactive processes in a very limited timeframe.

The OZCHI 2016 student design challenge invites participation from student teams from around the world. Participants will have 24 hours to develop a solution for a given HCI research problem. The top three entries will be invited to present their work at the conference.

The Challenge:
Meaningful social innovation

“The Key to succeed this challenge is to develop a socially ‘meaningful’ application which can be seen as a good linkage between exciting technologies and the real needs of people.”

Technologies are evolving in almost daily basis; on the contrary, the usability and acceptability for people however often still needs improvement before we get the best benefits out of the new technologies. We want to turn emerging technologies into functionalities that can be widely accepted and used; and applications that deliver meaningful interactions for people. Especially interactive technology, ubiquitous computing, wireless networking, and recent re-emerging VR and AR technologies allow integration and augmentation of physical components with interactive functionalities through mobile devices. This could be seen from home appliances, e-Health devices, transportation systems, entertainment services etc. The application of such developments challenges next generation Interaction Designers.

We welcome participation from around the world, on a broad range of areas, including the application of advanced technologies, electronics and programming, physical and virtual interfaces, material and engineering fabrication. Participants will have 24 hours to develop a solution for a given HCI research problem.

How It Works:

Registration is open from 11 July to 19 August 2016. Teams of 2 -5 members can register. All participants have to be students, but do not have to be from the same university or institute. A participant may not be a member of more than one team.

Students may be at any stage of their university career, from undergraduate to postgraduate. We encourage teams from multiple disciplines or institutions or even multiple countries or continents.

On 20 August, 2016 at 10 AM (AEST), we will publish the design brief for this year’s challenge on the OzCHI Student Design Challenge blog. Participants will have 24 hours to design a solution. Please note that you do not need to be in Launceston or Australia to participate. We welcome teams from all over the world to be part of the exciting challenge.

During the design challenge, we will have a couple of mini-challenges, the winners of which will be awarded with the exciting prizes.

You will have to demonstrate your solution in the form of a short, 3 minute video prototype or concept video, as well as a design document in the Extended Abstract format (no more than 6 pages). You are expected to keep a blog to document the process for your team and to keep us updated on your participation.

A committee of international experts will select the top 3 teams as semi- finalists to present their entries at OzCHI 2016 in a dedicated design challenge session.

The semi-finalist teams will be supported with a small travel scholarship each team for attending to the conference. Please note that the travel scholarship can only be spent on travelling cost to the conference venue.

The semi-finalists will present their entries in a dedicated student design challenge session at OzCHI2016. Presentations via Skype may be possible, if your team can't attend OzCHI. Papers written by each of the three semi- finalists will be put in the USB proceedings.

The semi- finalists will receive certificates of recognition and prizes during the OzCHI closing ceremony.

Challenge Registration, Details, and Blog

For more information about the OzCHI24 Student Design Challenge click here.